Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday January 02, 2011 @02:50PM
from the turn-it-off dept.

Charlotte Web writes "A 68-year-old man was arrested in Idaho after punching a teenager who refused to switch off their iPhone on an airplane. 'The unnamed boy ignored the flight crew's request to switch off electronic devices and instead continued playing games and listening to music,' after which, the teenager says, the man went 'ballistic.' After their scuffle, the 68-year-old man now faces a six month jail term or a $1,000 fine. But the iPhone-using teenager 'did not require medical attention and did not face any police action.'"

It does not matter.
As any (slightly-educated) flight attendant will tell you, the reason for turning off electronic devices is to get rid of any distractions that will stop a passenger from hearing instructions given by the flight crew.
Airplane mode or not, if there was a fire on the plane and you have your ear-buds in (or worse, noise-cancelling headphones), you will likely as not be burned to a crisp, because you will not hear the instructions from the crew.

If your phone or laptop posed ANY risk whatsoever, they wouldn't let you bring them on the fucking plane at all. If you can't bring four ounces of water on or a pair of nail-clippers, is there any chance that they're going to let you bring a device onboard that could cause interference with control and flight of the fucking plane and just trust the passengers on the "honor system"? Of course not.

The logic behind all of it is the same logic behind groping you at the security checkpoint and shouting at you li

if there was a fire on the plane and you have your ear-buds in (or worse, noise-cancelling headphones), you will likely as not be burned to a crisp,

Not withstanding the rightness or otherwise of this specific case, if someone is so zoned out into whatever they're listening to as to not notice that they're in a plane that's on fire, then perhaps that person is a good candidate for being deleted from the gene pool.

And for what it's worth, most of the time when I fly, the security guard who pats me down (not

I have noticed that as I get older I have become more obsessed with younger people following the "rules". Not sure why this is; just an observation. If I had to follow rules whether or not they made sense, then they have to do it too! The announced rule on the flight was probably to turn off ALL electronic devices. They don't say to put your device in airplane mode or deactivate any transmissions in a certain frequency range or give exemptions to this or that device. Too complicated. Teenager was prob